Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Robert Buckland and Andrew Jones

Wednesday 24th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones]

I beg the hon. Gentleman’s pardon.

As our Committee is gearing up for the consideration, may I point out that the Labour party has not taken up its places? We regularly meet when there is no Labour representation. We publish our attendance records, and I have just been looking at one of them. I see “zero attendance, zero attendance, zero attendance”. I fully recognise that it is not easy for colleagues to get to every event, and there are many reasons why Labour members of the Committee cannot always join us. I am not criticising those who have been nominated, because they have other things to do, and indeed we have gone out of our way to highlight that in the attendance records. We have gone as far as to say that

“committee members have other duties in the House…They may have commitments”

and so on. However, if colleagues cannot join us for a prolonged period, it may be wiser for the Labour party to nominate others who can attend, and could have attended over the several years for which we have been sitting. I do not think it reasonable for Labour Members to complain about a lack of scrutiny and then not take up the scrutiny places that are theirs.

We expect the Committee to be busy. We have been given an indication that the instruments will start to flow through to us very shortly after the Bill has completed its democratic journey here, and I look forward to continuing the work that we have done in ensuring that the correct scrutiny is provided.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones). He speaks with authority about the important detail and minutiae of procedure, which forms much of the subject matter in the Lords amendments.

I am also delighted to welcome the Solicitor General, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson), to his place. He follows in a very honourable tradition. We have mentioned the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which is, of course, very germane to this debate, but let us not forget the European Communities Act 1972 itself, which another Solicitor General, the late Lord Howe, took through this place when he was—in his own words, to me—in the happiest job of his political career. So I say to my hon. and learned Friend, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” I hope that it lasts a long time, because I think he brings a real quality to the job. He understands the role of a Law Officer, and I am delighted that the Government have chosen to deploy him at this stage of the debate, because although this might be seen as a rather arid area of the law, passions are running high.

I am sorry that I was not here to hear the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), but I was extremely grateful to him when, as Brexit Minister, he was good enough to consult me about his ambition for this Bill when I was on one of my furloughs from Government last year. It was an ambition that I understood and, frankly, shared. There is a strong, respectable argument to be made for those with the political will to show a sense of direction and give a steer to civil servants on what we want to achieve. There is no doubt that the aims of the Bill, which I continue to support, are entirely laudable. My right hon. Friend needs no criticism at all for seeking to continue to apply the collective feet of the machinery of government to the fire of regulatory reform.

That is what we are talking about here. Let us strip away the B-word, the Brexit word. Everyone knows what my position was on that: I was a remainer. I campaigned for it, fought for it and believed in it, but I accepted the vote of the British people. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said in his excellent speech, this really is another chapter in the delivery of the verdict by the British people that we were enjoined to carry out. That is why I think the mechanism is necessary.

I note the arguments about the otiose nature of this legislation due to the fact that various regulations can be amended or removed through the normal proceedings of the House, but it was right to come back to the issue of retained EU law after a moment of reflection. That was precisely the Government’s intention in 2017. I remember when I was in my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General’s place making the argument that this was a freezing of the law and a sweeping-up clause designed to put this category of law into an understandable compartment, so that we could return to the issues once we had got through not just Brexit but the transition period and once we knew the shape of the future relationship. We are now in that position, and my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset was therefore timely with his intentions and his wish to get things moving.

However, as with all honourable and great plans, events sometimes intervene. There were plenty of examples of officials across the civil service doing their best to identify which regulations and statutory instruments needed to go, but the National Archives kept cropping up again and again. There was also a question mark about the efficacy of the Government dashboard and whether it was too unreflective of all the regulations that existed pursuant to retained EU law. I have to say that that caused me to lose confidence that we could, in due time, identify all the regulations that needed to be looked at, swept up or removed. My fear was that we would have ended up in the position of repeal by accident, whereby perfectly decent regulations that still have an application today and that underpin business transactions or other relationships between the individual and the state would have been repealed. That would not have been good for the law or for certainty—the rule of law depends on certainty—and that worried me.

It therefore came as no surprise when the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Kemi Badenoch), came to the conclusion that she did. Hence the replacement of that ambitious sunset at the end of this year with what I will call the 600. This is resonant of Tennyson in many ways, and I hope that the end for this 600 will be as clear as the end was for the noble Light Brigade. As I think all Conservative Members would agree, we want to see that as the beginning, not the end, of regulatory reform.